


"The Long Night" Ficlets

by afterandalasia



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Battle, Canon Compliant, Coda, Episode: s08e03 The Long Night, Gen, Missing Scene, POV Multiple, Plothole Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 19:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18857683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: A handful of ficlets, canon compliant, that came about from rewatching The Long Night.1. Tyrion I - after the preparation, the waiting is the worst2. Melisandre - she knows she is to die3. Jaime - the dragons should have come4. Tyrion II - he thought the Starks were smarter than this5. Arya - from the Great Hall to the Weirwood





	1. Tyrion I

**Author's Note:**

> A handful of missing scenes and headcanons that smooth over some of the jagged edges of the writing during _The Long Night_. The stuntwork, acting, and physical effects were all exquisite, but there were a handful of missing moments. And poor Peter Dinklage has been criminally under-used this season.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion should have been _all over_ this shit in the preparation for the battle, holy fuck. But D&D apparently couldn't figure out how to write him. But they didn't say he _wasn't_ involved in planning to defend Winterfell, so I'll run with that.
> 
>  
> 
> ~~Also it would have made Daenerys rounding on him and threatening to remove him from the position of Hand much more impactful, let's be real.~~

The worst of it all is the fucking waiting.

He had thought that battle was bad, at the Blackwater, had wished to be well behind the lines. But it turned out that waiting beneath the crypts is worse.

Worse than all the weeks of planning. The weeks of going through the books with young Sam Tarly for any clue that might help them. Of asking Bran of the last Long Night, for what scraps Bran can find or is willing to discuss from the depths of his inhuman memories. Of discussing, both around the war table and away from it whenever he can find someone willing, as many ways as they can think of to festoon Winterfell with dragonglass until it glitters like some giant black beetle.

There are no rivers to chain, not like the Blackwater. And no wildfyre to pour down upon them.

It infuriates him, how little Daenerys will say of the strength of her dragons. How she will not hear him speak of what it will take to lay Viserion low again.

It must be her, or Jon, that much is clear to Tyrion. But Jon still looks like a child clinging to a tree branch when he touches the dragons; to call him inexperienced would be a compliment. He can barely pronounce the word  _ dracarys _ , no matter how many times Tyrion tries to impress it upon him.

But Daenerys would not listen, about what Tyrion has read in the books and the histories of old. He supposes that it should not surprise him, that she turns him away as he tries to tell her how to kill her child a second time over. Worse still that she should hear it from a child who killed their parent, at that.

So for all the good that it may do, he has told Jon of Viserion’s weaknesses, the best he can reconstruct them. Warned him of Rhaegal’s, as well, because for all that Daenerys would pretend her children are untouchable, it has clearly been shown that they are not.

They have their obsidian-studded walls, the barricades that he and Grey Worm had positioned to funnel the dead in lines and routes of retreat should they make it through the walls.

(He hopes they do not make it through the walls.)


	2. Melisandre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly prompted by my housemate asking why Melisandre walked so slowly on her way to light the trenches.

The cold aches in her old bones. For years, the fires of R’hllor have warmed her, but now with each prayer she speaks it feels like a little more leaves her. Perhaps it is that this is the Long Night coming; perhaps not.

Perhaps it is simply the cold of death, kept at bay so long that it comes creeping and not sudden.

She has practised, over the years, to make her slow movements look like grace, to hide the pain that bites at each bone as she moves. She keeps her expressions placid and her movements measured, and none need know what she is beneath the glamour.

She has been wrong so many times. Though it does not reach her eyes, inside she prays:  _ let this be the time that I am right _ .

Azor Ahai is not a man. It is an army. An army from many kingdoms, from across the seas, of fire and dragonstone and Valyrian steel. From the salt of the ground and the smoke of the fires of hearths they were born, from the salt of the Starks’ hospitality and the smoke of dragons’ breath. She has seen the fires of the forges that birthed their blades, and she has seen how many of them have lost lovers, husbands, wives, children, made into soldiers with bloodied swords by the cruelty of the sun that has set over them.

_ Please, let this be the time that I am right _ .

Atop a horse, it is easier to move, at least, even if she feels the cold clench in her bones as she gives fire to their swords. It has been days since she has eaten, weeks since she has felt hunger. Her flesh has stilled beneath her skin already, and even thirst and tiredness elude her.

She will not sleep again.

“Do not worry, Ser Davos,” she says, as his eyes pour hatred upon her. She thinks that he would have hated her even if she had been right, even if her desperate sacrifice had saved the King he loved so much. “I’ll be dead before the dawn.”

She will not see the coming day, the coming light, the time after the Night’s King. Let her die with the mistakes and the darkness; others can build the world afresh.

Davos will be one of them, but he does not need to be told that.

She will burn up the last of her soul, and commit her ashes to the Lord of Light. At least there will be no body to be raised.


	3. Jaime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean, I would have used the dragons to burn through the dead as they piled up outside Winterfell, but maybe Daenerys and Jon got drawn away by the Night King? Yeah, I'm gonna go with that.

The dragons were supposed to be here.

It had been agreed: when the dead came to the walls of Winterfell, when there was nothing but dead outside the walls,  _ the dragons would come and bloody burn them _ .

But there are no dragons.

He fights all the same, because there is nothing else to think of doing. The only thing he has ever been good at is fighting, because you do not have to be a good man to fight. Just like you do not have to be a good man to die.

He hopes that this Targaryen Queen and Jon Snow have bloody good reason to not come to the walls. That it is not the Queen’s plan to let them all die, and burn all the bodies that remain.

He has been failed by a Targaryen ruler once, and became a traitor for it. This time, there is no treachery he could do to save those around him.

So he fights, and roars his impotent fury, and the dead pour on unceasing.

And still the dragons do not come.


	4. Tyrion II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Confession time: my housemate and I _really hoped_ that the Stark dead would rise to defend Winterfell, because of the roots of the Godswood that run through them. Alas, no.

He thought the Starks were smarter than this.

Bones erupt from the crypts, and the Starks were the  _ North _ , were the oldest of them all and the ones most likely to remember the old ways.

The roots of the Weirwood, creeping into the ground of the castle. The iron laid across them.

He would have thought that they had the sense to only bury the bloody  _ bones _ .

Sometimes the danger of intelligence was thinking that nobody else could think so well as you. Sometimes, it was thinking that something was blindingly obvious when clearly, it was not so.

The next time he faces an army of the undead, Tyrion supposes, he will have to ask the hosts of the castle whether they made sure their dead were fully skeletal before hiding the women and children in a place surrounded by them.

“Where are the older crypts?” he asks of Sansa.

She does not look at him like he is mad, as she might once have done and like he might well have deserved, in a time when they had more luxury to speculate upon madness. But she points, with a shaking knife holding a shining blade, and the point is enough.

He grabs her other hand, and pulls her to the safety of the depths.

 


	5. Arya

_ Not today. _

It used to be Bran who danced along these roofs, but Arya watched him then and knows them now. Her feet land between the shards of obsidian, know just the spots for purchase on the hidden, uneven wood.

_ Not today. _

The end of the night is coming, and the day will rise, and she will greet it. She grits her teeth, silences the pain of her broken ribs and the crunching pain that runs through her foot each time it touches down. The pain can wait. Her blade can not.

_ Not today. _

The trees of the Godswood still stand, thick and numerous, the thought of cutting them down for defences too cold for the Northerners. Instead, they had set to clearing the land around Winterfell, to better give them a battlefield.

Some good it had done them.

She leaves the roof in a flying leap, but her breathing does not hitch as he feet find the branch of the first tree and she lands, foot and foot and hand, and the tree bows its branch to meet her but does not break. This is her land, these are her trees; they have seen her grow and loved her. She knows exactly what she can take from them, without breaking their boughs.

_ Not today _ .

The Weirwood stands tall among them, leaves lit like blood, like fire, like the ruby of the Red Woman, in the flickering lights. Its branches welcome her home, and she stills among them as the cries of the fighting grow far away and a cool, fresh breeze drifts across her face. It smells like clean earth, and morning, and memory.

Her breathing slows.

_ Not today _ .

The Weirwood does not whisper like the others. It is silent beneath her hand, cool bark against one palm as the hilt of the knife grows warm in the other. She watches the Ironborn fall, one by one.

The Night King comes. Death walks on his frozen feet, and Bran watches calmly, and waits, but does not speak.

_ Not today _ .


End file.
